


Paradarzana

by AllegoriesInMediasRes



Series: Mahabharata fics [2]
Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Blindness, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, missing moment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 09:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15860481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/pseuds/AllegoriesInMediasRes
Summary: She has given up her eyes, so her hands must do ten times as much work. A look at the early years of Gandhari’s marriage.paradarzana (Sanskrit): beholding the opposite shore





	Paradarzana

They are wedded, and Gandhari stands alone with her husband in his -- their -- bedroom for the first time. Dhritarashtra is explaining for her benefit, in an almost hesitant voice, about the layout of the room. “Nothing is ever moved without my consent, and in here at least, I can move without assistance. You too will learn to move about without help, when you have learned where all the furniture is.”

He keeps touching her, moving for her hand and grasping her wrist or elbow instead. She would almost be annoyed by it, if she didn’t find herself constantly feeling for him as well. She has given up her eyes, so her hands must do ten times as much work. Shakuni taught her well in how to read body language, and she will learn to feel it as well.

Dhritarashtra sighs, and fear spikes her, that she is a disappointment already. Then he says, “You may take off your blindfold if you wish,” and she realizes it is not she he is disappointed in.

He passes a hand over her face, runs his fingers underneath the cloth. Traces the outlines of her eyes.

She firmly removes them and brings them to her lips. Her mother taught her how to win over her future husband, and just because he is blind, it makes no difference here.

* * *

Dhritarashtra is surprisingly good in bed, for all that they must fumble around those first few weeks like children learning to walk. She is ashamed to admit that she was surprised -- of course, she has nothing to compare him against, but even during her years of sight in Gandhara, her ears were sharp, and she heard the maids gossip. She suspects he may have had a kind dancing girl or two in the past who taught him something.

She does not mind. She had always been slightly overawed whenever she thought of her future husband, half-afraid she could never be worthy of him, and it is relieving to sense he is just as confused as she is.

Shakuni sneers once that Dhritarashtra must share his brother Pandu’s difficulty in the bedroom, and Gandhari is tempted to snap back at him with all the crudeness that she would employ were she still Mahika, princess of Gandhar and her brother’s crony.

But she is Gandhari, Queen of Hastinapur, and her rebuke is instead wrapped up in graciousness, couched as a request to come stay in the palace and meet his brother-in-law for himself. She tries to show him how attentive Dhritarashtra is, how he is still trained in the arts of ruling and hunting. There is no reason he should be considered less than equal to any other king, and she knows Shakuni to be perceptive.

“He can’t even read,” is all Shakuni has to say, and she can imagine him waving his hand dismissively. “The position of royal herald must have a high turnover rate with how often they lose their voice, reading aloud all his correspondence.”

His voice becomes softer, more desperate. “You always loved reading, sister. Is this what you want for yourself? Never to see words printed on a page again, to see your own reflection, to stumble the rest of your life in darkness?”

Shakuni’s pleas are fruitless, but they do give Gandhari an idea. She instructs a maid to write out a brief sloka as hard as she can, so hard she leaves reverse indentations on the back of the paper.

It takes time to teach herself how to read backwards. Her fingers and her mind are rapidly adapting to the dark, however, and soon she is as literate as she was sighted. When she demonstrates her invention to Dhritarashtra, he is both intrigued and a little abashed, and he admits that he never learned how to read for himself. He was taught to write, but he was always forced to listen to others read aloud. No one ever tried to remedy the situation.

“Why has no one ever thought to do so?” Gandhari demands, indignant.

After that, all correspondence that comes into Hastinapur in thick lettering, and Gandhari herself employs scribes to rewrite letters that do not adhere to the new policy.

“The blind leading the blind,” Shakuni would say if he hadn’t learn to guard his tongue by now. But Gandhari can feel her husband’s smile at night when he sleeps, and hear the spring in his step when he is awake.

* * *

There are those who snicker that Gandhari will never be able to tell apart her sons, whose names she must not even be able to remember. By the time the jars are ready to open, she is already familiar with the vibration of each one’s wriggling, the individual scent of each one. When one of them walks into her presence chamber, she can tell who it is just by the sound of their footsteps, before the name is even announced.

Kunti, who has only five sons, cannot manage such a feat, as she says to Gandhari over glasses of chilled pomegranate juice. They are cautiously polite to each other, with just a hint of an undercurrent of admiration beneath. Were circumstances different, they may have been friends, even sisters.

Gandhari has never seen Kunti, but she has heard her described: the lines in her too-young face, the beauty that outshines Gandhari’s own, the widow’s white that constricts her. She imagines Kunti’s face twisting into a rueful smile, hoping she came across as more complimentary than jealous.

“I can always pick out Yudhisthira's walk, though. He steps as though he is a saint, too good for this world.”

Kunti’s eldest, so laboriously dutiful, is always a safe topic of conversation. They never speak of Gandhari’s eldest, or Kunti’s second eldest.

Pandu’s widow is still an ally for Gandhari, in straits and in showdowns. One night, Gandhari is awoken by the sounds of footsteps in her room. She assumes it is only a nightmaid who has not yet learned how to be quiet and shifts, mildly annoyed, to go back to sleep.

Then her blindfold is ripped off.

It is as though someone had chopped off her hair. She lets out a primal shriek that rouses Dhritarashtra and other, more loyal servants. She instinctively keeps her eyes screwed shut until someone presses it into her outstretched hands and she reknots it with shivering fingers.

It transpires that the culprit is the young daughter of one of Kunti’s maids, a woman who has been with her since her days as Pritha and a Yadava girl in Kuntibhoj’s house. The foolish girl had somehow gotten it into her head to steal “the blind queen’s” blindfold, whether as an insult or a prank.

The girl is the daughter of one of Kunti’s most loyal maids, yet the Pandava queen orders her dismissed and banished from Hastinapur before the sun even rises.

Gandhari is mute when she hears the news. “Whatever the rightness of your vow, it is _your_ vow,” Kunti says, voice tight, and it is the closest she will ever come to criticism of Gandhari. “No one may violate it. No one. I will not have in my household one who cannot respect a good woman’s decision.”

If Gandhari were not blindfolded, she would see Kunti’s eyes, haunted and clouded and heavy with memory. Were she more alert, she would hear the weight of kindred agony in Kunti’s voice. But Gandhari is shaken, and all she hears is impersonal righteous indignation, and she is only pathetically grateful to Kunti, before dropping back into slumber with nary a thought more.

**Author's Note:**

> In my headcanon, Gandhari was born Mahika, which means “friend, frost, earth” before she married Dhritarashtra and was known by the kingdom where she was born, much as Kunti was born Pritha.


End file.
